Good morning. I pray that you are ready to lift up your spirit in worship with the heart of God this day. Sundays are always days of special opportunity for exceptional worship, but whether or not worship is what it is intended to be is always up to each person participating. Today, I would like to share some thoughts about worship that I find challenging and inspiring.
- 1. Worship is practice for eternity
“I can safely say, on the authority of all that is revealed in the Word of God, that any man or woman on this earth who is bored and turned off by worship is not ready for heaven.”—A.W. Tozer
2. We desperately need to worship
“I need to worship because without it I can forget that I have a big God beside me and live in fear. I need to worship because without it I can forget his calling and begin to live in a spirit of self-preoccupation. I need to worship because without it I lose a sense of wonder and gratitude and plod through life with blinders on. I need worship because my natural tendency is toward self-reliance and stubborn independence.”—John Ortberg
3. Seeking a worshipful spirit
“You never go away from us, yet we have difficulty in returning to You. Come, Lord, stir us up and call us back. Kindle and seize us. Be our fire and our sweetness. Let us love. Let us run.”—Augustine of Hippo
4. Worship springs from amazement
“We live in an amazing world that doesn’t lack for awe-inspiring marvels of nature and technology. It’s critical that we don’t become deadened to wonder because astonishment is a raw material for worship. The moment we lose that childlike sense of wonder, it’s hard to worship with any real vigor.
We are perishing for lack of wonder, not for lack of wonders.”—G.K. Chesterton
5. Worship arises from the right priorities
“Every human being has a natural inclination toward praise and worship. If our world isn’t rightly ordered, we will end up worshiping and serving things besides God. It isn’t until we’re able to rightly prioritize God above everything else in our world that we can begin to worship in spirit and live that truth. Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.”—Charles Spurgeon
6. We worship an amazing God
“It’s mind blowing to think that we can worship God for thousands of years and never exhaust his worshipful attributes. If we become bored with worship, it’s likely that we’ve lost sight of this truth. Many Spirit-filled authors have exhausted the thesaurus in order to describe God with the glory He deserves. His perfect holiness, by definition, assures us that our words can’t contain Him. Isn’t it a comfort to worship a God we cannot exaggerate?”—Francis Chan
7. Music is a divine gift
“There’s a reason that nearly every culture and religion incorporates music into the act of worship. Music stirs some portion of our hearts that intellect alone cannot touch. When you think about it, it’s strange that music should exist at all. But somewhere, at some time, someone sang the first song—and it was a gift of God’s grace.
Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise. The gift of language combined with the gift of song was given to man that he should proclaim the Word of God through music.”—Martin Luther
8. Worship is the right response to God
“Worship is the proper response of all moral, sentient beings to God, ascribing all honor and worth to their Creator-God precisely because he is worthy, delightfully so.”—D.A. Carson
My prayer is that worship today will be loved, enjoyed, lifted up, made radiant, made to soar in its beauty, and be worthy of our God of Wonder.
Vern